Does the new Nforce 2 driver decrease performance?

[Ady]

Article @ Inquirer (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9606)

anyone here had the same issues at all?

[jnd3]

I lost about 1% on my Sandra memory scores. Well within the margin of error, in my opinion. Game benchmarks were all slightly higher (again within the margin of error). With all the different configurations, it certainly wouldn't surprise me if some systems saw performance decreases.

Some back of the napkin calculations...

There are what, about 7-8 nForce2 motherboards? Make it an even 10 if you throw in the various board revisions.

Then there's memory. We'll set that number at a modest 20 to account for different speeds and vendors people use.

Video cards? Make it a low 10.

Hard drives are quite a bit more diverse. We'll say 40 (for manufacturers, speeds, and sizes).

That means that (by these rough estimates, at least) there are potentially 80,000 combinations of hardware for which these drivers must work. Hardly surprising if performance decreases in some instances. Now if it's across the board, that's another story...

Cheers,
JND